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Enlarge ImageRequest to buy this photoForry family photographIn this photograph from the 1950s, Daniel Z. Forry, center, who inherited a hat the family believes is Abraham Lincoln’s, stands with his son Daniel S., 7, and Boy Scout J. Thomas Swank, 11.

NEWARK, Ohio – A gust of wind 153 years ago swept the iconic stovepipe hat off Abraham Lincoln’s
head and created a Licking County legend.

The Forry family has spent the better part of two lifetimes trying to get a museum to
authenticate the hat, but the family tale and a handful of clippings written years after the event
thus far have fallen short of the kind of proof required.

Just don’t tell anyone in the Forry family that the hat’s not the real deal.

“There’s no doubt whatsoever,” Dawn Forry said yesterday.

The story begins in February 1861, when Abraham Lincoln climbed aboard a train in his hometown
of Springfield, Ill., and headed east for his inauguration in Washington, D.C. On Feb. 13, the
so-called whistle-stop tour reached Columbus, where he stayed overnight.

The next day, the train’s first stop was Newark. According to an account in
The North American, a Newark newspaper, about 4,000 people turned out on a rainy
morning.

“I understand that arrangements were made for something of a speech from me here,” the paper
quoted Lincoln as saying. But time “has deprived me of addressing the many fair ladies assembled,
while it has deprived them of observing my very interesting countenance” for long.

The account makes no reference to Lincoln’s appearing bare-headed, though a later historian
recalled hearing that Lincoln motioned to the crowd that his hat had blown off.

That’s where the Forry tale picks up. Daniel Z. Forry and his 9-year-old son, Zelora, were
walking home from the station when the boy spotted the hat. Zelora died in 1934 and left the hat to
his son, Daniel Z. Forry, Dawn’s father-in-law.

For scores of Newark schoolchildren, Presidents Day often meant a field trip to the Licking
County Building and Savings Co. to see the hat and hear the tale.

The Forry family kept the hat in a safe-deposit box at the Newark bank until the bank was sold
in 1996.

“I think it’s a pretty interesting story,” said Dan Fleming, the Newark library’s local-history
expert. “But the era of when people in this community knew about it is in the past.”

Dawn Forry and her husband, Dan, now keep the hat in a climate-controlled case in a locked
storage unit in Lexington, Ky., where they live.

Only eight authenticated Lincoln hats exist, Mrs. Forry said, and she believes that she has the
ninth. “But without an account from the day that Lincoln lost his hat, it can’t be officially
authenticated,” she said.

Without authentication, no museum will display it and insurance companies won’t insure it, she
said.

She feels bad that so many Presidents Days have passed without any schoolchildren getting to
appreciate the hat.

“That’s where it should be — on display for children to see,” she said.